Southern Moderate African American Issues

Voter Verification

I received an email today from a prominent McCain supporter regarding the recent Georgia citizenship verification lawsuit.Is that voter id?

I personally don’t understand how any adult functions without government id.It would have been “to much like right” to simple require ids to vote and offer free ids to non-drivers.Bill Shipp op-ed this morning goes into details about the possibility of election problems this year.May I say that I am one African American who thinks the Voting Rights Act provisions on congressional districts are dated—yes, I agree with Lynn Westmoreland. The districts are to divided.

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Atlanta—Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel today applauded the decision by Fulton Superior Court Judge Tom Campbell to deny an attempt to block the implementation of the photo ID requirement in the November 4 General Election.

Georgia’s photo ID law has been in place for 14 elections without incident. The Democratic Party of Georgia filed the lawsuit, the organization’s second attempt to block the use photo ID. To date, opponents of Georgia’s photo ID law have failed to produce one voter who has been unable to cast a ballot due to the requirement.

Judge Campbell’s decision comes a day after the Secretary of State’s Office was sued by MALDEF, ACLU and other organizations for conducting a legally mandated verification check on new voter registration applicants. Judge Camp declined to immediately grant injunctive relief and is expected to rule next week.

Voters will be required to show one of the following six forms of photo ID when voting in-person in the General Election:

A Georgia driver’s license, even if expired;
Any valid state or federal government issued photo ID, including a free Voter ID Card issued by your county registrar or Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS);
Valid U.S. passport;
Valid employee photo ID from any branch, department, agency, or entity of the U.S. Government, Georgia, or any county, municipality, board, authority, or other entity of this state;
Valid U.S. military photo ID; or
Valid tribal photo ID.
Karen Handel was sworn in as Secretary of State in January 2007. The Secretary of State’s office offers important services to our citizens and our business community. Among the office’s wide-ranging responsibilities, the Secretary of State is charged with conducting efficient and secure elections, the registration of corporations, and the regulation of securities and professional license holders. The office also oversees the Georgia Archives and the Capitol Museum.

Nov. 4 could be a game-changing day in the life and career of Karen Handel, and she is not even standing for re-election.
As Georgia secretary of state, however, she is in charge of the conduct of the general election in our state this year. We wish her luck in carrying out her duties in a proper and legal way. The coming election is likely to feature a record number of voters, black and white, across the state. How Handel performs may determine her future as well as decide whether Georgia elections remain under the control of the federal Voting Rights Act.
As you know, our state was one of a handful placed under federal jurisdiction years go. We could not seem to hold a straight-up election in which black voters and candidates participated.
In view of our ugly history on the racial front, our behavior was easily explained. Georgia was not used to having blacks vote. Like most of the South, Georgia suffered from a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan activity, white primaries, church burnings and the rest of the shameful stuff that went along with then-legal segregation.
Nearly all the anti-black activities were organized, or at least not discouraged, by entrenched Democratic office holders. The party of Lincoln at the time was true to its legacy. But then came Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his civil rights laws, followed by Republican Richard Nixon and the Southern strategy.
Southern politics changed almost overnight. The old-time wool-hat crowd dropped their allegiance to the Democrats and joined the Republican Party. Many of the newly minted elephants did not understand that some Northern Republicans were more liberal on social issues than any Democrat they ever had met down South. They also didn’t grasp the notion that GOP fiscal policies were often anathema to the South. Didn’t matter. The Democrats had sold them out on the most important issue of all – race – or so they believed.
So much for history. Let’s get back to the immediate future: Nov. 4 and Karen Handel – our election chief and a Republican cheerleader as full of enthusiasm for her party as, say, Sarah Palin or Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who botched the 2000 Sunshine State election that gave us George W. Bush as president.
Enough complaints already have piled up to make us wonder if Handel is not well on her way to getting Georgia just where we don’t want to be: on the network news and the front page of The New York Times.
Consider the following:
► Handel has decided to require a waiting period between registration and voting. For instance, you show up to register, and you have to come back to vote absentee. There is no basis in law for such a regulation.
► The secretary has instituted checks on citizenship and ID at registration. The Republican Justice Department already has warned that such procedures cannot be used until they are pre-cleared under the Voting Rights Act.
► Handel admits that, with the election looming, more than 100,000 voter registration applications have not been processed. Nonpartisan observers have looked at county figures and told us the number of unprocessed applications may be twice as high as the Handel estimate. Handel contends Georgia has experienced no great surge in registration, so there is no reason to hire additional help to process applications. (That’s a little joke, right? The Cobb County voter registration office is constantly jammed with new registrants, at least half of whom are African Americans. Not too long ago, Cobb was ground zero for Republican activities in Georgia.)
Election sources say Georgia is shaping up as another Ohio 2004, where election officials failed to provide enough staff or voting machines in minority precincts. The result was chaos, and many voters never cast ballots.
Say it ain’t so, Madam Secretary. Say you and your staff will do their doggone best to hold an election with no funny business. Then keep that pledge.
After all, Georgia is certain to go for John McCain, so why risk cheating Barack Obama supporters? After all, they are in the minority and can’t win anyway. Don’t give my state another black eye for nothing.
• Reach Bill Shipp at P.O. Box 2520, Kennesaw, GA 30156, send e-mail to shipp1@bellsouth.net, or visit the Web site billshipponline.com.

What people should be concerned about is how many people/groups have registered folks to vote and did NOT turn their voter registration forms in on time. Here in Richmond County, I was told of an incident where someone turned in over 20 new voter registration forms on October 7th. Now that will scream of disenfranchisement (in the system) in a heart beat. But the real person to blame will probably be nowhere in sight.

The cry of “voter suppression” if the authorities request a photo id is old and tired. For the civil rights actor-vists things that are second nature to 99% of all Americans……they will focus upon that 1% who will be “victimized”.

Please note “victimized” means that they will have 2 years to scramble and get government issued photo id. What I have never understood is how “bed ridden” elderly people who they point to as not having any id and can’t make it to the photo office to get any can manage to make it to the polling place on election day.

The truth of the matter is that the civil rights community, the very one’s who hold voter registration drives to get more people voting are not about to “solve the problem”. This means they are not going to have a “get your photo id” drive. The fewer people negatively impacted by this heightened standard the more their argument is undercut.

Now I do agree with one of their claims. There needs to be a new process made for absentee ballots. Ironically a person need not use any sort of id at all in order to vote absentee.

In my view – anyone who believes that they might want to vote absentee should have to come into the county office and have a picture and fingerprints taken. The new absentee ballot should have some type of “one time use” finger print kit where upon voting the voter makes a thumb print and includes it in on the return paper work.

Why would anyone be opposed to the government collecting your thumb print? They already have it on file from when you did your license/state id.

I am frustrated with the civil rights community. They have run out of blatant public racism to focus upon and they SURELY are not dealing with the threat that Black On Black crime is to too many Black residents. They instead choose to go back to the old standard of “Speaking Truth To Power” even when they have to make something a bigger issue than it actually is.

Man, you are so right….again. C.F. were are you when the media (including Fox) brings out the resident Negro pundit who went to prep school, joined a white frat at a white university and can’t clap on beat at his uncle’s funeral.

I see the number of hits you have on your blog. Outstanding. But, we need to take this community political discussion wider. Get the venue and contract with the charter bus companies, we need to have one live forum before election day, stream it via the web and tell it like it is.